Last week, my 7-year-old was given a new piece to learn on the piano – Bach’s Minuet in G. He’s been playing for almost a year and, if I can be a little biased, he’s picked it up very quickly. So he was excited to start, and then very disappointed to find out it was more difficult than he’d imagined.
He got frustrated, then upset – and then he starting doubting his ability to play at all.
“I can’t do this. It’s too hard,” became his mantra.
I sat down with him and asked him, “When you first started swimming lessons, how long could you tread water for?”
“5 seconds.” he replied.
“And how long can you tread water for now?” I asked.
“5 minutes.” he said.
“What happened between the 5 seconds and 5 minutes? What did you do?”
At this point he rolled his eyes – he has heard me ask these types of questions hundreds of times before. He knows the answer.
“Practice and time.” he said begrudgingly.
The conversation, though, was enough for him to go back to the piano and try again.
A lawyer I’ve been assisting in his career recently started a new role. He was excited to start, but – as many of us are on our first day – worried. The contracts and transactions he would be working on would be more complex than those he had done before. Even though his new Partner knew this and was committed to training him in those areas, the lawyer called me a few weeks in, very anxious.
We discussed what he had been doing in the past couple of weeks. He told me that he had needed to ask a lot of questions on almost every contract he had worked on, and that he was starting to wonder whether he could get on top of it.
I asked what he thought he had learnt in the past few weeks, and he told me all about the complex matters he was working on, and the great work he was exposed to. On reflection, he was surprised by just how much he had done in a such a short space of time – and how much he had already learnt.
He discovered that his knowledge was going through a phase of imperceptible growth. Tiny steps that he couldn’t see unless he looked back at how far he had come already. I reminded him that his learning curve in a new role working on contracts he hadn’t been exposed to before would be steep.
In the end, whether you’re 7-year-old piano player or an experienced lawyer working on new stuff, it is the growth that you can’t see, that comes with time and practice, which will be the making of you.